THE MINIMALIST VS. THE CHEF; Showdown in the Kitchen

By MARK BITTMAN

Published: April 13, 2005

EDITORS' NOTE APPENDED

WHEN I started writing about food 25 years ago, I was made aware of the difference between chefs and home cooks. Editors said, ''Write your story, but get a top chef's recipes.'' So I turned to Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters and other exalted creators of the ''new American cuisine.'' Ideas for home cooks came from chefs, Julia Child, James Beard and one or two writers. ''Normal'' home cooking barely existed in food journalism.

But by 1990, a couple of things had happened. For me, the new crop of top chefs were ones I considered colleagues, not demigods, people like Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Michel Richard, Gary Danko and Chris Schlesinger.

And home cooking, the kind practiced by our grandmothers, began to have a resurgence. We recognized that daily cooking could be just about as rewarding as spending four hours on a Saturday duplicating a recipe made famous by a chef.

I was straddling two worlds: the cuisine of chefs I wrote about, and with, and the ''let's have something decent with the kids'' cooking of my ''Minimalist'' work.

This spawned my new television series, ''How to Cook Everything: Bittman Takes On America's Chefs.''

A home cook -- that's me -- says to 13 well-known chefs, ''I may not know what I'm doing in your kitchen, but I know what I'm doing in mine, and I'll show you that simple food cooked at home can taste as good as yours.''

Sort of like challenging Tiger Woods to a quick round? Perhaps not entirely. On the show, a chef in his or her restaurant prepares a chosen dish, as complicated as he or she wants, with as much help and with whatever ingredients he or she wants. I follow with a dish that is related in concept, spirit, main ingredient or major flavor, working by myself with supermarket ingredients. I proudly maintained my klutzy standards regardless of the proximity of heavy-duty copper cookware and $100,000 Bonnet stoves.

My main point was this: Like almost everything else in life, cooking has a cost-benefit component. When I cooked with Daniel Boulud, he took apart a lamb and cooked it four different ways. He used exotic ingredients galore, ones that would take you days to find, but that he pulled (or had pulled) from the pantry or walk-in. He had several assistants, hours of preparation, the best equipment money can buy and 35 years of experience in the world's best professional kitchens. His dishes took him all morning and filled a platter the size of a table. He then proceeded to laugh as I assembled my stuffed lamb shoulder in 10 minutes, threw it in the oven and went out for coffee.

I'm not saying that you'd be as happy paying $35 for my roasted stuffed lamb shoulder as you would for Daniel's boned, stuffed and tied saddle. As he said when I served him a piece of lamb on a small plate, ''The complexity of your recipe is directly proportional to the size of this dish.'' But I am saying that you would probably be happy eating either. And in this as in just about every other case featured in the TV series and book, my dish was faster and required less work, no assistants and fewer ingredients.

Most important, it required less skill. Daniel, who called me an accidental cook, gave my dish an ''eight'' for flavor and a ''two'' for complexity, which seemed just about right for me. I gave his a ''nine'' for flavor and a ''two'' for accessibility. Our group tasters pretty much agreed on all counts.

Four-star chefs have no desire to cook like their mothers. (To let you in on a dirty secret, few ever cook at home.) On the other hand, there's much to learn from them, because they cook all the time. Whether they're trained in the classic French style, are essentially self-taught or specialize in a cuisine from the other side of the world, they all have a hundred times the experience of even the best home cook, which has led them to develop proprietary methods and flavor combinations. This is the real joy of working with chefs.

A few weeks after submitting to Daniel, I returned to the kitchen of my friend and sometime co-author, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, one of the world's most-imitated chefs.

Since we met 10 years ago, Jean-Georges and I saw that we understood each other. We shared an openness when it came to flavor -- his greatness stems in part from the fact that he lovingly embraced Asian cooking when most French people considered soy sauce an abomination -- and a reluctance to complicate matters.

Still, we are hardly equals in the kitchen. When Jean-Georges watched me mangle a shallot, he said, ''That's not mincing, it's hacking. When you write a recipe, do you put in '1 shallot, roughly hacked'?'' When he saw me trying to debone a Cornish hen, he grabbed it from me, saying, ''Let me put you and that poor bird out of your misery.''

Most of the chefs I worked with teased me mercilessly. In their 19th-century world, one needs a long apprenticeship (the cooking school degree is a recent innovation), one that begins with picking the leaves off parsley stems. They believe there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything.

But I'd grown up seeing my grandmother hold a potato in one hand and use a butter knife held in the other to chop it, and I knew that did the job just fine.

Editors' Note: April 20, 2005, Wednesday
An article last Wednesday by Mark Bittman, a cookbook author who contributes the Minimalist column for this section, reported on his efforts, as a home cook, to replicate dishes by the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Mr. Bittman, whose columns sometimes draw from his cookbooks, explained that this one was based on his new book and his public television series, both called ''How to Cook Everything: Bittman Takes On Americas Chefs.''

Although The Times is not the producer of the series, the note with the article should have acknowledged that the newspaper sponsors it and uses video from the programs online at nytimes.com.